Often, inmates at correctional institutions wish to place collect phone calls to friends and family members. Such phone calls from inmates can create substantial toll charges to the persons at the terminating phone number. Historically, a portion of such toll charges have been uncollectible, thus, causing the Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) providing the service to incur losses.
To address this situation, various approaches to limit collect calls from inmate facilities have been employed. In general, these call velocity limit systems track collect calls to terminating phone numbers over time to ensure that a toll limit is not exceeded within a predetermined time period. Once the toll limit is exceeded, further calls to the over-limit terminating number are blocked for some time period.
The prior art call velocity limit systems have employed various toll limit metrics. For example, some prior art collect call velocity limit systems enforce a temporary ban on collect calls after a predetermined number of collect phone calls or collect phone call attempts to a terminating number have occurred within a predetermined time period. Other approaches temporarily prevent further collect phone calls after the monetary value of collect phone calls to a terminating number within a predetermined time period have exceeded a predetermined toll limit.
The prior art call velocity limit systems have also employed various time period metrics. For example, hourly, daily, weekly and/or monthly limits have been used by prior art systems. Further, some of the prior art systems have employed a fixed time window when determining if a collect call limit has been exceeded. Others have employed a rolling time window in this role.
Some prior art call velocity systems have notified calling and/or called parties that collect calls are being blocked, no known prior art system has notified these parties of the future date when the call block would be removed. Further, no known prior art system notified service representatives of the future date when such a call block would be lifted. Further, while the service representative might try to manually determine a future date when the restriction would be removed, this inquiry would be a time consuming process. Therefore, inquiries from individuals concerning collect call blocks have traditionally resulted in uninformative and/or lengthy call center calls.